I'm on 660TIs in SLI which are not the newest horse in the stable and can run just about anything out maxed (16x AA etc.) @ 1080p. You won't need this card unless you're going multi monitor and / or retina level.
Keep in mind that even if you're maxing the in-game settings, you aren't maxing out the image quality fully. You can still go beyond that with supersampling (essentially rendering at a higher resolution, then downscaling to your monitor's resolution in order to prevent aliasing). Standard anti-aliasing tries to detect edges in order to find specific parts of the image to supersample, but it isn't perfect. If you want the best image quality possible, supersampling is the way to go.
The downside though is that it's extremely resource intensive. Even 16x MSAA antialiasing is faster than 2x supersampling. With supersampling, at 2x on 1080p you're rendering at 3840x2160 then scaling down to 1080p - effectively the same as gaming on 4k.
I have two rigs, one with dual r9 270s and another with SLI'd gtx 760s. Each can run dota 2 at 2560x1600 with 2x supersampling at around 40 and 30fps respectively.
The image quality is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but even those cards in an SLI isn't enough to push that amount of pixels.
With quad Titan Z's, you could probably do 4x supersampling - nearing the quality you'd get with source film maker, but in real time.
Personally I find having a higher frame rate in faster paced game is far more important than having a diagonal line be perfectly smooth. In the middle of a game you'd never be concerned with how perfect the image looks.
But going from nearly perfectly smooth lines to perfectly smooth lines should not be a profitable market. Nobody will notice the difference during any real gameplay. You can already do great anti aliasing so why would someone pay $1000+ more for a 10% or less gain.
I think the main purpose it serves for Nvidia is branding. This gets plastered all over the tech news and everyone knows Nvidia makes the fastest GPU. People then associate them with better technology (for better or worse).
Why someone would buy it? There are a lot of people who want the very best. It's the same reason people buy an Aston Martin over a Toyota.
From a more practical perspective though, there's also future proofing. This card will be able to deliver high frame rates for a few generations of games. People who don't want to regularly rebuild their rigs might prefer this card.
However, there is an extension of "multi monitor" that's probably going to become a big thing: VR gaming. VR gaming demands both more pixels and a consistent, high framerate, and could percolate more quickly down from "most hardcore of the hardcore" to "many people who enjoy gaming own one" than 4K displays or huge monitor stacks have.
This particular GPU is a multi-GPU single-card solution which is probably worse for VR, because alternate-frame rendering adds latency and can result in uneven frame timings especially when two sequential frames have dramatically different complexity.
Yes, and thus the cards are always racing one another.
If the cards display frames as they're available, they end up with uneven display times, which is a quite jarring visual effect. If they VSync they end up with the standard VSync issues where occasional slow frames are difficult to handle. Both are undesirable traits for VR. An output buffer naturally adds latency, which is also undesirable.
AMD cards in Crossfire used to be notorious for this effect, but they've since added an adaptive frame-rate limiter (forcing fast frames to delay, like VSync but not bound to the display's refresh) which helps.
The downside though is that it's extremely resource intensive. Even 16x MSAA antialiasing is faster than 2x supersampling. With supersampling, at 2x on 1080p you're rendering at 3840x2160 then scaling down to 1080p - effectively the same as gaming on 4k.
I have two rigs, one with dual r9 270s and another with SLI'd gtx 760s. Each can run dota 2 at 2560x1600 with 2x supersampling at around 40 and 30fps respectively.
The image quality is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but even those cards in an SLI isn't enough to push that amount of pixels.
With quad Titan Z's, you could probably do 4x supersampling - nearing the quality you'd get with source film maker, but in real time.